FAQ - data management

This page gathers questions from ARENA staff on themes such as the processing of personal data, data management and sharing. Answers and further questions will be added after the "Ask and expert" staff meeting (2 April 2019).

Are project leaders (and in turn, the University of Oslo) responsible for data processed by project participants, who may also be employed at non-Norwegian institutions, and possibly under different national laws?

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I am collecting data on individuals' biographies to process them in quantitative analyses, without indicating names of individuals. (a) What would be the correct storage of such information? (b) Will I have to ask individuals for permission (which would make this kind of research virtually impossible)?

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Subjects give consent after having been informed of research purposes, but what if purposes change? When should subjects be informed of later developments in the project?

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Is audio-recorded consent ok, or does it have to be a signed paper sheet? According to NSD this should be fine?

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Can documents obtained by FOI requests to different countries be made publically available (open access database)? Can they be uploaded to NSD?

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What support and techniques are available to be able to conduct news media research given that most newspapers now protect their content? JavaScript code makes it almost impossible to get at the actual text automatically, and it is not clear if that text is copyrighted. Can it be used for research purposes when it is publicly available, i.e. not behind a paywall?

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Copyright law: (a) What are the valid regulations in Norway regarding text-mining? Is there anything as the conclusion of UK Intellectual Property office (2014: 6) allowing non-profit researchers to use copyrighted material for quantitative analysis? (b) How does the copyright law vary from country to country - the collected data originates in different countries and are protected by their local copyrights? (c) What is the legal status of the web-scraped content without explicit permission in Norway, and other countries? This debate is very much alive in the field, so far, I havent found any lawyer who would be able to provide such overview.

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Is it ok to provide an anonymised Twitter quote in a scientific publication, even though the person can be identified by the reader by googling that quote?

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How is a research project defined, and in which cases do I have to notify the NSD of my plans for data collection?

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In the UK, there are laws specifying conditions for doing research in the public interest, i.e. on elected officials (Data Protection Act 2018), which supplements the GDPR for researchers. Is there anything like this in Norway?

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Published Mar. 27, 2019 2:05 PM - Last modified Mar. 28, 2019 11:17 AM